Unable to load a gif created by moviepy. Fault of avconv?

[drewm1980]

I created some .gif videos using moviepy, and would like to reload them to combine them into a bigger movie. The .gif files I created play great in mplayer, but ffmpeg / avplay fails to play them (see error below).

If gif loading is broken in avconv, is there some other lossless format that's not broken? Or even better, a way to avoid avconv entirely? Thanks!

In [26]: movie = VideoFileClip('database/evaluation_set/movies/2016_07_05__15_59_04.gif')
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
IndexError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
/home/awagner/venv_widgets/lib/python3.4/site-packages/moviepy/video/io/ffmpeg_reader.py in ffmpeg_parse_infos(filename, print_infos, check_duration)
    264             line = [l for l in lines if keyword in l][0]
--> 265             match = re.findall("([0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9]:[0-9][0-9].[0-9][0-9])", line)[0]
    266             result['duration'] = cvsecs(match)

IndexError: list index out of range

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

OSError                                   Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-26-9bfa53fabb70> in <module>()
----> 1 movie = VideoFileClip('database/evaluation_set/movies/2016_07_05__15_59_04.gif')

/home/awagner/venv_widgets/lib/python3.4/site-packages/moviepy/video/io/VideoFileClip.py in __init__(self, filename, has_mask, audio, audio_buffersize, audio_fps, audio_nbytes, verbose)
     53         # Make a reader
     54         pix_fmt= "rgba" if has_mask else "rgb24"
---> 55         reader = FFMPEG_VideoReader(filename, pix_fmt=pix_fmt)
     56         self.reader = reader
     57         # Make some of the reader's attributes accessible from the clip

/home/awagner/venv_widgets/lib/python3.4/site-packages/moviepy/video/io/ffmpeg_reader.py in __init__(self, filename, print_infos, bufsize, pix_fmt, check_duration)
     30 
     31         self.filename = filename
---> 32         infos = ffmpeg_parse_infos(filename, print_infos, check_duration)
     33         self.fps = infos['video_fps']
     34         self.size = infos['video_size']

/home/awagner/venv_widgets/lib/python3.4/site-packages/moviepy/video/io/ffmpeg_reader.py in ffmpeg_parse_infos(filename, print_infos, check_duration)
    268             raise IOError(("MoviePy error: failed to read the duration of file %s.\n"
    269                            "Here are the file infos returned by ffmpeg:\n\n%s")%(
--> 270                               filename, infos))
    271 
    272     # get the output line that speaks about video

OSError: MoviePy error: failed to read the duration of file database/evaluation_set/movies/2016_07_05__15_59_04.gif.
Here are the file infos returned by ffmpeg:

avconv version 9.18-6:9.18-0ubuntu0.14.04.1, Copyright (c) 2000-2014 the Libav developers
  built on Mar 16 2015 13:19:10 with gcc 4.8 (Ubuntu 4.8.2-19ubuntu1)
Input #0, image2, from 'database/evaluation_set/movies/2016_07_05__15_59_04.gif':
  Duration: 00:00:00.04, start: 0.000000, bitrate: N/A
    Stream #0.0: Video: gif, pal8, 800x600, 25 tbn
Output #0, null, to '/dev/null':
  Metadata:
    encoder         : Lavf54.20.4
    Stream #0.0: Video: rawvideo, pal8, 800x600, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 90k tbn, 25 tbc
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (gif -> rawvideo)
Press ctrl-c to stop encoding
frame=    1 fps=  0 q=0.0 Lsize=       0kB time=0.04 bitrate=   0.0kbits/s    
video:0kB audio:0kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead -nan%

[drewm1980]

I was able to get past this error by installing ffmpeg from https://launchpad.net/~mc3man/+archive/ubuntu/trusty-media

The new ffmpeg generates corrupt files with the png encoder, but I guess that's a separate issue, so I'm closing this.